Defining Agile Sooooo, I saw a couple folks arguing earlier about what is or isn’t Agile. That’s okay. People do that. Analytical people thrive on doing that. Anyone who’s gotten to the level of journeyfolk in any arena will seek to define that arena. All very healthy stuff. Nowadays I tend to avoid these arguments. […]
Defining Agile: A Musing Read More »
User Stories If you are concerned about how you write a user story, you have missed the entire point. A user story is a little card that reminds us of all the actual conversations we’re currently actually having. If the words "bathtub farting" are enough for the team to actually converse about what they signify,
User Stories Are Playing Pieces: The “Right Writing” Is Wrong Read More »
I’ve been having a lot of trouble getting to sleep lately. I go to bed cuz it feels like it’s time. Sometimes my body won’t settle, itching and twitching and such like. Sometimes my mind won’t. Usually it’s a mixture of both. So I get back up. But then I’m tired as hell, and it
Me & Molly & Marvelling Read More »
EDIT: This premise has been renamed the "Steering Premise", you can see the full video breakdown here. The Driven Premise Here’s an illustration of the most basic principle of TDD, what I call the "Driven Premise": there once was a queen who had a thousand consorts, each more brave and handsome than the next. But
The Driven Premise Read More »
Assumption-Boxing I’m thinking of maybe a new geepaw coinage: something like "assumption-boxing". This is when we frame a problem with an assumption that narrowly limits (boxes) the range of solutions. A real-world example we’re all familiar with: "Optimize meeting structure to exchange status reports on individual’s sub-projects". Do you see that "meeting structure" is a
Assumption-Boxing is Harmful Read More »
What are preasons? A remarkable amount of geekery-advice comes in the form of rules & slogans accompanied by appealing. intuitively correct, theoretical reasoning using simple logic applied to pre-existing abstractions. I’m gonna pull a GeePaw-ism here and relabel "appealing, intuitively correct, theoretical reasoning using simple logic applied to pre-existing abstractions". I’m gonna shorthand these to
Turn Preasons Into Reasons Read More »
Have you ever noticed how much children love to help? Modern motivational theory offers us a triplet: purpose, autonomy, and mastery. (PAM) children helping surely excites P and M there. As adults we’re all slightly less desirous of helping. I attribute this to two factors. First, there’s a lot less M in it for me
Test It Where It’s Easy A basic mantra: don’t test things where they’re hard to test. A very basic application of this mantra comes up for almost every noob TDD’er: "How do I test this complex private method?" The answer is simple: make it not private somewhere else and test it there instead. If your
Test It Where It’s Easy Read More »
The Problems with Enterprise Standards I’ve been thinking lately of how much "enterprise standards" ruin our lives. When I coach in VBCA environments, I confront this problem more or less constantly. The standards can be enterprise tools, enterprise negotiations, enterprise processes. I see two factors in this. 1) solution-locking definitions, and 2) inadequate coaching reach
Standardize-By-Problem, Live Vertically Read More »
I spoze we should talk about scaling. There are a bunch of branded solutions to the puzzle of how to organize development of large apps with large teams. I don’t know of one that is worth the bits consumed in its logo. Yesterday I mentioned assumption-boxing, that’s when we express a problem in such a
